Criticism for your benefit

Month: September 2014

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Quentin Tarantino has become such a huge director since his initial debut with “Reservoir Dogs” in 1992, immediately afterwards in 1994 he went on to make “Pulp Fiction” which is in my top three films of all time (so far). Everything this guy releases seems to be astounding, he’s someone you can practically guarantee to put out something worth watching, and you never feel he’ll let you down if you get excited for one of his films. Perhaps it’s good then that his only sub-par film came when no one knew his name. “Reservoir Dogs” holds so many Tarantinian elements that just don’t work in this film, but they are traits and signatures that Tarantino has since come to exquisitely perfect.

So I won’t pretend that I loved “The Lego Movie” as much as seemingly everyone else did. I’m sat in the horrible position where the thoughts going through my head are along the lines of “How on earth did this receive any sort of acclaim?”. I’ve been here before, most notably after watching “Gladiator” around a year ago. I’m sure most have dealt with being told a film is amazing and seeing evidence everywhere around them that this is in fact true, but upon getting around to viewing the film, the feeling of just being completely underwhelmed is crushing. It did surprise me though, I was surprised to see the raving reviews, and I was surprised again to see that my initial assumption of how “The Lego Movie” would turn out, was correct. This is the longest advertisement you will ever watch, sure it will self mockingly point out that it is an advertisement, but that just makes it a clever one.

I think I’ve been in the room whilst “Transformers” was on about 6 or 7 times since it was released, I know the whole movie but I’ve never sat and actually watched the entire thing from start to finish (I’m sure a lot of people have had this experience with at least one movie). So I thought “Hey let’s give that one a shot” because I thought you couldn’t really go wrong with a blockbuster to waste a few hours of your time that could be better spent wasting away on games and daydreaming. Well… I guess I was kind of right, I mean, it could have been worse, right?

As far as I’m concerned, last year wasn’t a particularly good year for animation. “Frozen” – a film I don’t dispute the quality of – somehow managed to beat Studio Ghibli’s “The Wind Rises” for the Academy award for Best Animated Feature Film. Whilst, even more inexplicably, “The Croods” and almost sacrilegiously “Despicable Me 2” were also considered for the award. The Academy Awards were six months ago now, and with the release of “How to Train Your Dragon 2” also comes a certain feeling of security, and also confidence. The film will no doubt be nominated for an Academy Award and has a very good chance of winning the award outright, and I’m happy that another of the five slots for nominations will be definitely filled with something actually worth considering, and there is still time left for more.

When you realise that you want to dedicate your entire life to something because you love it so much, be it a person, animal, hobby or whatever else you can think of. To find yourself unable to pursue that is really really upsetting.